Sections are forever

Posted on:
February 25th, 2019

Ori Redler

Hi to all,

Lately, when laying-out a book, I’ve encountered this problem: I needed to have some paragraphs‘highlighted’ with a background. This is common in some types of books (e.g., self-help books, guides, sociology, etc.). I’ve tried to do this with text boxes, then tables, then use some type of highlighting via the character style.

All powerful options, but none fit my needs here: text boxes had to start and end on the same page, character styles were more befitting highlighting some words, not several paragraphs, and tables were, well, too much trouble. And then I remembered that I’m stupid. Here’s what I did, and what you should do in the same situation:

Select the text that should have a background, and then choose Edit > Make Section from Selection. That will turn the entire text you’ve selected into a separate section.

Open the Section palette choose “Solid” in the “Background” pop-up menu, and click the “Colour” color well to choose your color.

In the Section palette set the Space Above. If this is a book, you’d probably want this value identical to the body line spacing, so pages start and end properly, spacing-wise.

Create the character/paragraph styles as fits the highlighted text. For example, if the background is dark, you should reverse the character style colour. Also, set the paragraph’s margins and space above/below the text so it fits nicely within the highlighted section.(a side note: you’ll notice that the space below does not show with the very last paragraph of the section — because it is the last paragraph of the section. You should create a new paragraph and set it’s line spacing to 0.1 pt, without a space above.

The sample below will prove to you that this is actually possible.

That’s it for today — behave yourself and drink no more than 14 cups of coffee a day.